Nation's Youth Isn't Good Enough For Top-Tier Universities

Nation's Youth Isn't Good Enough For Top-Tier Universities

According to The New York Times, Stanford University accepted only 5% of applicants in its most recent admissions session, or 2,138 out of 42,167 applications for the class of 2018.

It's a problem plaguing many of the country's elite schools, as admission rates lower than 20% were almost unheard of a generation ago. The University of Chicago used to hover at around 40%, but now it's more like 8%. That's hardly seen as a bad thing, either — ivy leaguers like Harvard and Princeton wear that exclusivity as a badge of pride.

Admissions counselors blame the fact that kids nowadays — many of whom are high achievers from overseas — just want to go to college too much. "[Students] send more applications than they once did, abetted by the electronic forms that have become nearly universal and uniform applications that can make adding one more college to the list just a matter of a click," reports the Times. It also spoke to one student at an upscale private high school who applied to 11 different colleges, only to become one of Stanford's many, many rejected. (Don't feel too bad for him, though — he's going to Yale instead.)